Fall Harvest 2010

I love this time of stocking up.  We are going mushroom hunting, and plan to cook a bunch of sauces and store them in the freezer, and also to dry them. Even though we don't have that many tomatoes that are ripe on the vine, we do have enough to make a few dishes, and the leeks have been one of the best things we have grown- hardly any work for the effort. I can cut up a leek and make the entire dish taste better. I made a leek, carrot, celery, and burdock stock that will make a great base for either soups or for cooking rice or quinoa. 

Marc is the Souper boyfriend in the winter time! He loves to make soup on the top of our wood stove, getting up periodically to stir while relaxing after snowboarding on Sunday afternoon. I just harvested burdock root from the farm, and made a stock from it for the freezer. This stock plus an endless supply of leeks, potatoes and kale will make his job easier! You should have seen Marc's face when I showed him how to plant the leeks. He tried to put the whole 4" pot of leeks in one hole and complained that they were falling apart. I showed him that each toothpick sized leek had to be separated and planted about 2-3" apart from one another.... His mouth had dropped and he just glazed over and mumbled something about feeding the worms and walked off. I only had to weed the area a few times during the season, and I grew squash up the fence next to them. Definitely worth it!

Next year I plan to plant shelling beans to save seeds for winter soups. I was afraid they would be too much work to shell, but I think given the potential taste factor I am going to give them a try. I have Jacob's Cattle and have an affinity to them because I have a friend named Jacob who's family raise cattle in Africa.

Vegetables keep coming

Yum, Dinner!
Well, We are getting plenty of squash of all kinds out of the garden, and cukes and leeks, and green tomatoes. I forgot to take a picture of the fried green toms we made. I just cracked an egg and added a little water to whisk it up, then dredged it in flour with a little salt and pepper, and a little Thyme. I think one of the secrets to the toms is that you have to cut them really thick, and fry them for enough time for them to be cooked all the way through. The spices could have been better, but I finally got the texture right. I think we will be having a lot more of these!

Our friend brought us 2 king crabs that were caught and cooked that day on the San Juan Islands! We ate those up one day, then cooked up the shells at a soup base. We used that and these veggies to make a great soup for dinner, and froze the rest in 2 serving containers. We will see if they ever come out of the freezer, but I would add more cream and potatoes and it will be even better the second time around!

Tomato Trellis & Hoop House Time!

You might have just gotten some plants and stuck them in the ground and are hoping they do well and the soil warms up soon... well, that is ok sometimes, and especially with sungolds, and some past varieties, but not with the bigger varieties. You need to protect your babies from the cold weather, and help them keep upright and keep their leaves from touching the soil... I know that is a lot to think about all at once, but you need to start thinking about your tomato plants' needs.  1) Warm soil- you can use clear plastic to warm up the soil before you plant. Some people think that black plastic will heat up the soil, but test showed that the plastic itself heated up, but the soil underneath did not... The clear plastic really does work. 2) Warm air at night and protection form too much moisture- there are many ways to make a hoop house or temporary greenhouse out of greenhouse plastic and hoops made out of bent irrigation pipes over rebar and clips to hold the plastic in place. You can rig up some sort of angled windows supported by something sturdy like framing lumber, but be careful to make it strong enough- you wouldn't want it to fall on the plants or an innocent bystander...
If you have questions or want to purchase some of the greenhouse plastic in lengths of 20' @ 4$/ft, let me know. It is the 6mil greenhouse plastic that farmers use. email me at jayne@sistersageherbs.com- Only in the Seattle Area please!! I will be adding pictures as I get the tomato garden pictures together this season.
peace-
Jayne

Succession Planting

These are my notes from the talk I am giving tonight at West Seattle Nursery:

Plan Well: You will do much of your planning based on when each of the crops will be done, then you will know when & where to place the next crop.  It helps to buy plants already started or start your own in a separate place or between the crops so you can just place them in where you can, but you can start directly in the bed as well.

Calculate your needs: You will need to be honest about how much your family can eat in a given time, and how much space you have. Your family may be able to eat more than 1 salad per day, but not much more- the salad will be bolting after awhile- it is the same for all the early crops. Don’t be afraid to thin your plants- the best ones will feed you well, too many will be stressed at this spacing.

If you don’t have much space to grow the plants that normally take up space out in the yard- you can go up. Dig a trench and supplement the soil underneath with the complete fertilizer before planting   Tomatoes, Squash, & Cucumbers on a trellis or fence. This will cut down on soil-based diseases, too.

Irrigation: If you are tending a small garden, and in the garden daily, it might work out to have a pitcher for water right by the garden bed. If the garden space is larger, you can use soaker hoses or a drip irrigation system with a timer. It depends on your commitment and availability.

Season Extenders: Use irrigation pipe over rebar and greenhouse plastic to help your tomatoes, eggplants  & peppers ripen in the summer and keep your chard from freezing in winter.

Steve Solomon’s Complete Organic Fertilizer: *4 parts Cottonseed or Canola Seed Meal

*½ part lime (agricultural) *½ part Phosphate Rock or Bone Meal * ½ part Kelp Meal

Mix this together and add when prepping the bed, transplanting and mid/late season- it will break down slowly through the season and be available to your plants when they need it. 

Planning a Party from the garden to the Dish

My friend and I are each having parties on or near the Summer Solstice, and she asked me to grow a row of food for her and tell her what will be ready. So, I had to start looking at my garden in terms of when I want to eat the plants, when they will be finished producing, and what I will put there next. I look at the maturation date on the seed packet then count backwards from the party. That is when I plant the seeds...

So, spinach will be ready between 30 & 60 days depending on the weather and how big you like to eat it- so Solstice party is going to have spinach dishes. We may have peas still going and we will have chard, kale, broccoli, small tender beans and squashes and blossoms going, etc. It has been a fun way to look at home garden food production. Planning never has anything to do with reality some years, though...

The resources I used for planning are: Seattle Tilth's Maritime Northwest Garden Guide by Seattle Tilth, THE organic gardening resource in Seattle, The Square Foot Garden by Mel Bartholameu, combined with Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades by Steve Solomon are great resources for this exercise. Although Sq/Ft suggests cramming the veggies together, decide how many you will grow/use while they are in season, and then timing the harvest, and GVWC wants you to space out the plantings so you don't have to water so much and the roots don't compete with each other- both rely on fertilizing, turning the space as quickly as possible into the next crop, and weeding out all the other plants that grow nearby. I have to just take it all with a grain of salt and just trust that if I can find the vegetables in the weeds, it is a good day after reading The One-straw Revolution: Introduction to Natural Farming by Masanobu Fukuoka , a manual and biography about a cool farmer from Japan who never weeded or pruned anything in his garden, and planted his rice with "weeds" to nourish the land during the off season, and did not plow or flood his rice fields in the 1930's (which made him a complete freak farmer in those days)! He would plant his fields by putting together mud and seeds (all kinds) and throwing them into the field- they look like clay marbles. When they grew, he knew that the conditions were favorable for those plants, kind of like planting volunteers... he would send his interns out to forage for edibles each night.

10 Salads in 10 Days Challenge!

I have challenged myself and my clients to eat one head of lettuce per day for 10 days in order to make room for the tomatoes that are going to be ready by then. Then I realized that I have so much lettuce (& other salad greens) in my yard and they will all bolt as soon as the sun comes out in earnest. Actually, the hard rains every night and mild, partly sunny conditions in the day are perfect lettuce growing conditions. Which reminds me to seed more lettuce! The seeds you plant now could be part of a salad for your 4th of July BBQ... What are you having for dinner in October?

Garden Trellis Ideas

Here are some great Ideas for trellis' that my friend Willi is suggesting on her blog, diggin food. She is the West Coast editor for Organic Gardening ands she lives in my neighborhood. Although these are great ideas and pretty low cost, any way you can get the plant to grow upwards will work. I have seen so many make shift trellis' made from bed box springs to old hand rails turned sideways! We are using a scrap of my friend's deer fence that had gotten tangled in blackberries, and in order for them to get it out they had to cut it out... it was perfect for our fence. That was the first bed we readied for this year, since we can see it from the dining table. Now the peas are grabbing hold... We have our peas in containers because we have railroad ties as the border of our yard.  When the peas are done, the squash will be ready to go up! And on the other side, we plan to grow our cucumbers and beans the same way.

I am off to Vashon to plant more dang strawberries and clean up the plant propagation area on the farm. 

Volunteer Learning opportunities:

Check out the Spring into Bed Events going on in Seattle this Saturday, May 8th! Longfellow Creek Community Garden is hosting a garden revival work party from 10-2. Stop by and work, or just come say Hi and look at what we are creating down in the Del!

Sister Sage Herb Farm is hosting an event on May 29th for anyone who wants to help at the farm and learn about medicinal herbs.